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Shawn Thornton thought he had a decision to make. Luckily for him, the Boston Bruins took that decision out of his hands, and the enforcer doesn’t sound like he has any hard feelings about the situation.

The Bruins informed Thornton shortly after the season ended that they would not be-signing him, a decision that made Thornton an unrestricted free agent. Hours after free agency began on July 1, the veteran winger signed a relatively lucrative two-year, $2.4 million contract with the Florida Panthers.

That puts Thornton’s Boston residency on hold for a couple of years, but he swears he’ll be back in the Hub once his career comes to an end. That’s something he emphasized again Tuesday as he revealed some details of his year-end meetings with the Bruins during a radio interview on 98.5 The Sports Hub.

“The year-end meeting was kind of (Bruins general manager Peter Chiarelli) saying ‘I’m very loyal to you and a few other guys who have been here for the last seven years with me, and I’m gonna have to weigh my loyalty versus what I think is best for the organization in the next few years,'” Thornton said Tuesday morning.

“You’d have to ask him, but for them to offer me a contract, it probably would have been a lot lower than what I was going to get elsewhere, too. To be completely honest, if I wasn’t going to come back and if it was going to be a lowball offer to try and take a hometown discount, it would have been a very difficult decision. They probably did me a favor by letting me go a little bit early. I’ve got a couple of years left and this will always be home. So I’ll go make some money and hopefully help Florida and then come back and settle down here (in Boston).”

Thornton’s departure does remove one of the club’s most influential veteran leaders from the dressing room, but Thornton doesn’t foresee the Bruins lacking leadership any time soon.

“We had a really tight locker room, and that’s not just me; that’s the guys who have been here forever — (Patrice Bergeron, Zdeno Chara),” Thornton said. “As far as taking over that role, probably (Milan Lucic). I think he’s growing into it. He’s had some good people around him for the last seven years. I think he’s kind of, he’s a leader.”

Would love to see Milan drop the kid shit and grow into a leader role. He and Marchand are some of the games most decisive players if they are on, unfortunately and fortunately they play with a lot of emotion and love the B thats on their chest, so sometimes they try to play Bruins history professor rather than professional hockey player.

Obviously the Bruins are a bunch of overpaid Idiots.They get their asses handed to them by the Canadians in the playoffs and then start dismantling their team.It's kinda like the stupid Red Sox who think they are the best team in baseball,but look at them now 10 games out and in last place.All I see is Boston Strong means your sports team suck and so do their fans.Boston Blows should be their theme

Mark B. a truly ignorant disrespectful post. Using the symbol used to work through a tragic event and deface it to make a juvenile statement. Even Montreal had the respect for what "Boston Strong" represents. Classless